Tyler Sperrazza, the Chief Production Officer at Freedom Reads, and I pulled our 26-foot Penske moving truck full of Freedom Libraries into the staff parking lot of the Maine Correctional Center, just a couple dozen feet from the sally-port that gave entrance to the prison grounds. We had just driven 240 miles from Hamden, Connecticut, to Windham, Maine, and my heart was pounding.
I had been released from prison 3 ½ months earlier after serving 30 years. I don’t want to say I felt at home pulling up, but prison is the house I grew up in.
We had traveled to the Maine Correctional Center to open Freedom Libraries inside seven different housing units. I felt like I was bringing these men and women the world, the stories that set me free, book after book after book.
I remember the decades’ worth of volunteers visiting my prisons. They brought books, education, stories, joy, and hope. I always felt a little bit of their freedom for those brief moments in time. And here I was, sharing my freedom.
For me now, walking back in, especially through the front door, is the ultimate freedom. No handcuffs, belly chains, or strip searches after signing the visitor’s logbook and receiving a clip-on visitor’s pass. I even used the visitors’ bathroom, not because I needed to, but because I could. But the metal detector still taunted me and the GPS monitor around my ankle felt extra heavy.
Once in the housing unit, I was home. The men and women leapt at the chance to be the first hands on these books. They approached without hesitation and with a familiar energy to help fill the bookshelves. I could see myself in them, scanning the back covers, considering which to take back to the cell, which would be the first to free their mind from prison.
The five hours went by fast. Tyler and I took a few pictures with the prison in the background because who would believe they let me back in, then out again? After less than four months on the outside, I couldn’t, and I felt a twinge of guilt when we pulled onto the road. I got to leave, but the men and women I just met didn’t.
But the now empty truck rumbling behind us reminded me that we didn’t abandon them. Freedom Reads left them with over 3,000 books, each one offering companionship, hope, and a vision for their future outside.
I’ll never forget my first time back.